Topic Summary

Posted by: nacho

The British reboot, which puts us in Victorian England and tries to stay loyal to the book, is abysmal.

The Epix reboot, which takes us to the modern day with a global cast, is okay! Two episodes in. Episode one is the slow set-up and rather overlong intro to the rather overcrowded cast. But that's okay because they don't fuck around too much. we get to Murderdeathkill by the end of it.

Episode two is good, too.

Pretty much everything is out the window in the Epix reboot. These aren't martians, and they're robots or something. There's some loosey goosey things like a blind chick can pick up their signals and shit. It's supported entirely on apocalypse adventure and a strong ensemble.

I have started to notice that some older school UK actors don't translate well to modern TV. We have Stephen Rea in The Stranger (which is an interesting Netflix show that's trying to be like The Outsider and everything else) who instantly slows everything down with his brooding presence. In War of the Worlds, the anchor is Gabriel Byrne. SO I love Byrne. But... Like everything he touches slooooows down. And that's not quite welcome when alien war machines have just executed a 5 year old girl and there was an insane fire fight in the scene before.

So it's like BANG BANG KABOOM WHAMMO!!

Smash-cut: Gabriel Byrne walking in the park musing about the nature of the attack.

Posted by: nacho

So Z Nation -- set three years after the apocalypse -- is really retarded. I could never really get into the "zom-com" aspect of it (a genre that as overdone before it even started).

Z Nation was cancelled last year and Netflix gobbled up the rights, putting together the prequel series Black Summer. And...it's amazing! It's what Fear the Walking Dead should have been. Set during the apocalypse, it's more just a straight up zombie show. We follow an unrelated and scattered group of survivors all heading to the advertised sanctuary spot via several different paths. It's all quite simple, paint by numbers shit... But that's fine! It's a zombie apocalypse show! All they have to do is have scary monsters, likable and doomed survivors, and fun sets. And they do all of that without the navel-gazing of Fear or the convoluted retardation of TWD and, most importantly, without the comedy of Z Nation.

Eight episodes, half an hour each. It flies by and is worth the watch.

Posted by: nacho

The Passage ends next week and it's been consistently good all season. They've sore of cherry-picked the best stuff from the first two books which means the only possible option for season 2 is the 100 year time jump... But, well, that might work. It'll be interesting to see how they pull it off.

Posted by: nacho

The show has been consistently brilliant -- and consistently flawed -- but the finale arc was really just damn good TV all around. It felt like we took a little bit too long to get here, and that it wasn't exactly mapped out to begin with, but the nature of the show is that retconning is not only allowed, it's inevitable. The zillions of splintered timelines in play by the time we get to the showdown ultimately gives the writers the power to do absolutely anything they want.

And they run with it in all the right ways. The ending seems very clean, but it's up to you. On the surface it's a happily ever after ending... But, then, the very last scene pretty clearly says: Nope. It was all for nothing. They failed. And, from there, lies another question: Failure might not actually be a bad thing, which some of the characters were leaning towards during the showdown with the Big Bads.

Fascinating, really. The sort of show I plan to return to and watch again some day without year long breaks between seasons.

Posted by: nacho

Oh, oh! And the people who want to be slaves because they're starving. So they refuse to be freed instead of, you know, revolting against the paramilitary force that doesn't actually want to be there and would clearly hesitate to fight back. Of course, we just need that so we can get some grandstanding about how wonderful America can be! Even though you get this exchange:

Posted by: nacho

What really ties the season together is the Japanese vampire storyline. And the frequent raids on the Chinese imperial palace where, apparently, anyone can just walk in and threaten the all-powerful dictator-for-life who's orchestrating the genocide of all non-Chinese Asians in the most obvious ways possible and yet they all still blame the Americans.

Wait till you get to the sudden shift where the Chinese storyline isn't important anymore, leading up to Sunday's episode where they magically produce a Chinese destroyer decoy 6000 miles from where we last saw it.

Posted by: nacho

It's engaging! Last night they piloted a Chinese destroyer on cruise control into San Diego harbor and blew it up and then hid their destroyer behind the smoke so that the entire named cast could conduct a suicide mission leaving only noncoms in charge of the ship! They even stopped a train on a dime one inch from charges on the track!

It's Amazing!!!!

Posted by: Sirharles

Posted by: nacho

So now that The Last Ship has dropped its ridiculous and jingoistic war with China storyline it's good again! America has fallen to a coup led by Elizabeth Rohm and her amazing tits. Our heroes must now root out this evil and reform the United State! Yay!

Oddly, post-Coup America is more apocalyptic than anything we've yet seen in the series (which continues to generally ignore the idea that 70% of the world population died just about six months prior to the show's current timeline).